Socrates

Socrates himself repeatedly denied the role of teacher,and he never bores us with the wagging didactic finger.But he did boast the role of midwife."And like the midwives,I am barren,and the reproach which is often made against me,me that i ask questions of others and have not the wit to answer them myself,is very just- the reason is that the god complels me to be a midwife,but does not allow me to bring forth...

But to me and the god they owe their delivery the very midwifely technique by which Socrates revealed ignorance in his conversational partners suggested that truths lay undiscovered within each person being questioned: the Socratic technique implied a hidden wisdom in everyone.Socrates' paradoxical discovery was that skillful dialoque could elicit the universal ignorance and universal potenrial for wisdom inside each person.the pursuit of truth was a fluid process that took place in the living,spoken word.

Plato lived in an age of transition in Athens when the written word was invading the world of learning.This ewplains his cconcern for the menace of the written word_expressed in the warning of the Egyptian god-king Thamus to Thoth,the inventor of writing."...this discovery of yours( writing) will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls,because they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.the specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory,but to reminiscience,and you give you disciples not truth,but only the semblance of truth.."